Building The Dream Home
When I was young, I was all about Barbies and one of my favorite christmas presents was the Barbie dream house. Did you have one of of those? I thought the elevator was incredibly cool. So maybe it comes as no shock that I wanted my very own dream home as an adult.
A few years back, we had the opportunity to move from the suburbs of Atlanta to my hometown in Tennessee. My husband worked for himself in a job that he could do from home so we thought that if there was ever a time to try to live near family it was then. Before we placed our house on the market, we found a house on a street that I grew up desiring. The homes on that street were historic and all different. It is the most "famous" street in that small town. Old trees there for decades even centuries. Beautiful. The home we chose needed attention. It was one of the remaining homes on that street that had not been renovated. Keep in mind that we had never really renovated anything. We (and by we, I mean my husband) did some DIY projects around our town home but this was a massive undertaking. Yet we were crazy enough to pursue it. Call it young and stupid or brave. The jury is still out. Our Atlanta town home miraculously sold and we moved to Tennessee to begin renovations. The home was 100 years old with an unfinished attic space. It was the kind of open space that made your jaw drop. There was huge potential. In May of 2010, we started demolition. (I need to write a whole other blog post about what its like to move states, be pregnant, have a wild toddler, sell a house, buy a house, move into a rental, move into another rental, lose a job and have a husband who travels while renovating a house. Crazy times for crazy people.) We took a neglected house and made it our dream home. We fully gutted the entire house. Every wall. Every ceiling removed. You could stand in one spot and see the entire house. The potential was so exciting. My husband redrew the plans no less than 30 times but his need for excellence made our house absolutely beautiful. After 11 months of renovating including an addition to the back of the house, we finally moved into our dream house.